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PHPB 7160 - Issue Paper

Read & Understand Empirical Articles

  • Review your PubMed search results to read and understand the information about your intervention:
    • Read the Title and Abstract sections of the article first to determine if the article discusses your desired topic. 
    • If the article is on-topic, then review the Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion sections for helpful contextual information and analysis of the study data, which could be discussed in your issue paper.
       
  • If you find different or additional terms for your topic as you're searching and reading article abstracts, try adding them to your database search to make sure you're finding everything you can on your topic in the database!


View a short video for tips on reading scholarly articles below:

 

Reading Sections & IDing Additional Terms

When you read a scholarly article, pay the most attention to the top and bottom areas of the document - these tell you the most useful information for your assignment:

  • Title & Abstract - summarizes the article, indicating whether it is a good fit to continue reading. If it's not a good fit for your assignment topic, no need to continue reading.
     
  • Introduction - tells you helpful background information about the topic and provides context for the study that is being done. Generally contains many useful references to other articles on the topic.
     
  • Methods - describes how the study is being conducted. This indicates whether the study is empirical, and shows what type of experimental conditions or data collection is being used.
     
  • Results - normally a long middle section of the document, including a large quantity of numbers and tables. This section may be skimmed over, to focus more on the following sections for better understanding.
     
  • Discussion & Conclusion - provides the interpretation of what the data tables mean. For example, if the results data show certain numbers across a table, the Discussion section will tell you if Group A performed more positively or negatively than Group B. A take-home message you can write about! 
     
  • References - these citations allow you to see the information that the study authors cited, and they help connect academic works together as a conversation about a topic. See how to use Google Scholar to find articles that cited something you already found in our tutorials here!